THE ‘HISTORY OF ART’, as many know it, opens with the Ancient Greeks and Romans, makes a few stops at familiar names like Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Picasso, then arrives at Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s tinned soup in New York, before it all gets a bit confusing. But who wrote this story about a bunch of white dudes anyway? Were there no women or non-white artists? Or was everything they did simply not very good?
These are just some of the questions that have prompted artists, art historians, curators and museums to challenge this history. Attempts to re-write this narrative to include women, non-white, non-Western and queer artists ultimately exposed the existing story of art to be a ‘straight white boys’ club’. It became obvious that writers of this history had relied on processes of exclusion and marginalization to further validate the existing order of relations between perceived opposites, such as man/woman, white/non-white, high culture/low culture and civilized/uncivilized. Art history was clearly on the side of the dominant class, gender and race, while all other art was carefully written out for being ‘craft’, ‘primitive’, ‘passé’, ‘derivative’, ‘exotic’ or just plain ‘bad’.
The question at the heart of these efforts is: ‘Whose story is this history?’ One artist who has long engaged with this line of enquiry, through his art and curatorial practice, is Fred Wilson. On the occasion of his groundbreaking solo show at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992, a sign on the front of the building proclaimed that visitors would encounter ‘another’ history inside. The exhibition, ‘Mining the Museum’, in fact presented many of the museum’s collections anew through surprising and satirical juxtapositions. One display under the title Metalwork 1793–1880, for example, showed an ornate silver tea service alongside a set of iron slave shackles from the same period. The tea service had previously been displayed in a section of ‘silverware’, but the shackles had never been shown before – these were not part of the ‘history’ told by the museum. Precisely by displaying these objects next to one another, Wilson showed how our systems of classification can hide uncomfortable truths and that history is never just one story.
These are issues Wilson has explored further in his own art practice. Guarded View (1991) is an installation of black headless mannequins dressed in the uniforms of security guards from New York’s leading art museums. These faceless mannequins place the figure of the guard – who is typically trained to be ‘invisible’ so as not to interrupt the viewing experience – front and centre. Wilson said that ‘this work was really about having been to museums, going to museums for years, and noting that besides myself and the guards, and perhaps, the people in the food service or the maintenance, you know, we were the only African-Americans or people of color in the museum. And no one in the professional staff, who decides what gets put on display, how those things get described and discussed, what’s acquired by the museum.’ With this work, Wilson called attention to the systems of power – in this instance, of both class and race – that operate within art museums and society more broadly.
Attempts to re-write the history of art have exposed the existing story to be a ‘straight white boys’ club’.
Wilson is among many in the art world who have fought hard to insert black artists back into the narrative of twentieth-century art history. A number of leading American museums are now building on this effort and, thanks to dedicated scholarly research, acquisitions and exhibitions → see Q, African-American artists are slowly receiving long-overdue recognition. But this is just one of the ways in which art history has opened up.
Globalization has been a radical catalyst on this front. Buzzwords like ‘transnationalism’ or ‘global art history’ signal a shift away from the predominant ‘Eurocentric’ approach that privileges European culture over other cultures. Exhibitions such as ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ (Magicians of the World) at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1989 have sought to address the problem the curator described as ‘one hundred per cent of exhibitions ignoring 80 per cent of the earth’. In fact, the proliferation of large-scale international art exhibitions that bring together artists from diverse geographic and cultural origins has prompted new questions, such as: how should we understand similar works of art that emerge in different corners of the world at the same time? What happens when the art and culture of one nation is forced upon another through colonization? What does that mean in terms of influence and originality? How can we understand the impact of imperialism and capitalism on our evaluation of art and artists? Is it even possible to tell a history of art that takes into account all artistic activities worldwide? In short, is a global art history possible? It is this questioning of the status quo that unites the multiple voices that rally against the age-old story, however diverse their approaches or specific their agendas.